I got introduced to jrock bands like My First Story and ONE OK ROCK through youtube when I was in high school. Don’t really remember the exact year. I’m 99% sure I first discovered them through AMVs (anime music videos LOL) or something similar to that.
I really enjoyed the music and wanted to listen to more jrock bands so I did some digging and discovered the GazettE. I was instantly hooked!
I was looking up Gothic Lolita fashion info on YouTube back in early 2007 and found a Malice Mizer video. The algorithm brought up Miyavi, Penicillin, and maybe LMC as recommendations. From there it was off to LiveJournal to find communities and everything spiraled out of control from there. I fell out of jrock after the collapse of LJ but my sister (who teased me MERCILESSLY for 5+ years about jrock) randomly started listening to some of the songs I had recommend back in the day and got me back into things again recently.
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Never been fan of anime, but out of boredoom watched FFVII. I heard the soundtrack and thought, what a hell of a voice! Listened a few more stuff from Gackt, then watched his movie and found Hyde.
Then someone was not stop talking about Gazette. I just listened them to close their mouth. I loved them.
And then everything else…
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I was introduced to J rock through anime more specifically by FMA 03 and bleach those were one of my first anime I ever watched. In 2014 I started occasionally listening to the complete list of Bleach openings fma sometimes Naruto etc. In 2017 I really wanted to listen to more japanese music and explore bands, the first band that I can say I was a fan of was Scandal followed by The oral cigarettes. In 2022 I finally gave 90s bands a go, more specifically L’arc en Ciel and instantly fell in love with their music. They are the band that introduced me to VK.
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Funnily the Song that lead me into VK hell was the same the first post innthis thread mentions: X-Japan’s Forever Love
Me and my best friend were anime teens and super into X-1999. I loved Forever Love as the Ending of the movie and looked into some info about the band and learned about their deceased guitarist hide and something about him was so facinating to me that I searched for a store that sold japanese CDs and got my first j-rock CD. That must have been in 2004.
Shortly after I found some other girls who were into it and also dragged my best friend. New years eve 2004/2005 we went to a visual kei party.
I never completely stopped liking vk/j-rock but there were some years were I wasn’t that invested but lately I really missed the good old days. Sadly the scene is very small nowadays where I live. But next year I will be in Japan again and hope to see some concerts 
My story is kind of weird, cuz I basically got introduced to VK twice as a child but if anyone’s curious
A very long time ago when I was 12 I heard Dir En Grey’s clever sleazoid. Being the stupid kid I was I brushed them off as some emo band; a really really good emo band mind you. Despite this early exposure to Diru I didn’t go searching for more VK bands. I don’t think Diru was even considered VK at all during that time. I think they stopped being VK in the mid-late 2000s?
A year or something later a girl I used to hang out with in streams had a bunch of VK bands on her page. I was intrigued because I hadn’t heard any of those bands before and I was used to knowing all the bands on people’s profiles. So she showed me some of her bands in stream and I absolutely fell in love, and a week or two later I was already into far far more VK bands than her and became obsessed.
I bought a french magazine called Japan Vibes in 2002 (Japanese culture: manga, music, Japanese story…), when i see an article about Dir en Grey, it was a visual shock and i bought Macabre by mail order. It was a musical thunderbolt in my head when i listened this scud!
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It looks like I accidentally wrote in the wrong place 
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I won’t forget how it all began.
All because of Final Fantasy. 
My introduction to Japanese music came through Real Emotion, a single by Koda Kumi released with FFX-2. I was looking for the full song in English, and only Koda’s Japanese version came up. In the end, I ended up liking it more than the English version.
Then, a break came and I got into J-rock… with FF again!
Dirge of Cerberus and Gackt.
Redemption was my first J-rock single and my obsession with a Japanese artist. I was hooked on him until 2010/2011, until I noticed a decline in his musical quality.
I have many of his singles and albums.
Over the years, they still seem like quality material to me. At least until RE:BORN.
After that, of course, Malice Mizer, the GazettE, Versailles, Plastic Tree… those were my first bands.
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I was into anime and knew people because I would attend events and such. One day someone showed me a MALICE MIZER video, Bel Air to be more specific.
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When I was 13 or 14, we had computer science classes. And in one of the folders on the computer (with class materials, making slides or something like that) there were photos of Mana. I thought, ‘She’s so beautiful! I’ll save the photo.’ Then I showed this photo to my online friend. She laughed about it for a really long time. She sent me several Malice Mizer videos. My classmates liked anime and were hyperfixated on Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge, and they called me Sunako (lol). The opening of that anime was Kiyoharu’s Slow, and I SWEAR I listened to it for hours.
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While I knew their existence in the past, I started getting invested in visual kei back in quarantine, more specifically, I got interested to a band “Strawberry Song Orchestra” ( still one of my favorites )
But I didn’t explore other subgenres until I found out recently that my dad listens to L’Arc n Ciel
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